International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Vol.38, No.16, 6780-6788, 2013
Microstructure tailoring of YSZ/Ni-YSZ dual-layer hollow fibers for micro-tubular solid oxide fuel cell application
YSZ/NiO-YSZ dual-layer hollow fibers with a thin YSZ top layer integrated on a porous NiO-YSZ (60:40 in weight) support, have been developed by one step method via a co-spinning-sintering process. Hydrogen reduction was performed to form YSZ/Ni-YSZ micro tube as the half solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs). The microstructure of the dual-layer hollow fibers was tailored by adding ethanol as non-solvent in the initial mixture dopes for NiO-YSZ anode spinning. LSM cathode containing 20 wt%-YSZ was deposited on the electrolyte surface by dip-coating method to fabricate micro-tubular SOFCs. Experimental results indicate that the dual-layer hollow fibers from the anode dopes containing 15-20 wt% of ethanol possess the desired microstructure with optimized properties, such as the bending strength of 180 MPa, the porosity of 38-35% and the conductivity of 3000 S cm(-1) at room temperature. The micro-tubular SOFCs fabricated from such hollow fibers show a maximum power density up to 485 mW cm(-2) at 850 degrees C with 20 mL min(-1) of H-2 as fuel and 30 mL min(-1) air as oxidant, respectively. Copyright (C) 2013, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.